I'm officially doing this... But of course the Mapmakers agreement gives ownership of map images to the graphic artist. Which means I would nee permission to use any of the other 170ish maps other than my own...

I've talked to lack, and I've heard this has been attempted before, without success. Here is proof that it can work, and I can do it cheaply.

Click image to enlarge.

Now this is just the prototype as I get down my technique. It's a little off center, and I didn't ramp up the dpi, so the image is pixelly. I spent money on the initial materials, around 30 bucks, and another 8 bucks for the printing at Staples. The boards are recycled old games I purchase from thrift stores and yard sales. I put in like 30 minutes getting it put together. I can easily sell these boards to the CC public at large without an astronomical cost. 20 to 25 bucks depending a few factors like size of the image.

All I need is permission from mapmakers to use their images for boards, and of course I'd cut you in on the profit. It's YOUR image, it'd be YOUR money.

Also there is the upcoming ARC tournament (http://www.annualriskclassic.com), for which I will be donating boards for prizes, I was hoping about 5 boards, much as I'd like them all to be of Japan and Philadelphia, I'd like to have a few different maps to give away. That's up to the mapmaker if they don't mind giving away their image for free.

The details:

The only thing I'd need from a mapmaker is an image (the large image) sent to my email address, (redbaron@dejazzd.com) preferably at at least 500 dpi and I'll take everything from there. I'd kinda need to figure out the part of the game that is the cards, but that shouldn't be a huge issue. Territory names, in one of 3 colors with probably a shrunk down outline of the territory, and then laminated. Couple extra bucks to the consumer possibly.

This can seriously work, and can possibly be lucrative to mapmakers.... ok not THAT lucrative, but I bet you could buy a beer or two extra next time you goto a bar and say, "Yeah, I bought my beer with money I made for drawing a map." Instant chick magnet. Okay... probably not.

This would work better for vector images... bitmap images designed for web sizes are kinda hard to resize to print resolution without redrawing most of the map.

Also, not all maps are suitable for this - maps with very small territories won't be easy to adapt to board use, since you need more room to fit all the armies on the territories. Also, things like army circles etc. are useless on boards...

Anyway, if I have time at some point, I could try creating a print size version of some of my maps... I think my latest one, Yugoslavia, could work well as a board game.

A typical game board is approx. 24-26 inches wide. If Rb0 wants to print the boards at 500 dpi, that means the images need to be 500x24 pixels in width. That is, we'd have to create images of ~100 megapixels, or 10 000 pixels wide.

Also, Dim, you insult my intelligence when you assume I don't know what DPI means.

A typical game board is approx. 24-26 inches wide. If Rb0 wants to print the boards at 500 dpi, that means the images need to be 500x24 pixels in width. That is, we'd have to create images of ~100 megapixels, or 10 000 pixels wide.

Also, Dim, you insult my intelligence when you assume I don't know what DPI means.

the post was not intended to insult your intelligence and it was meant for you and RedBaron0.

asking for 500dpi is silly. just as silly as asking for 100-150dpi.

let's say RedBaron0 wants to print a map on a 20" x 20" paper. his printing equipment produces great quality at 300dpi. doing the multiplication, that means he requires an image that is 6000*6000px and that's what he should ask for.

for example if i have that map on a 8000*8000px file at the photoshop standard of 72dpi my image will print perfectly on RedBaron0's printer without the need for a dpi change. if i do the mistake to take his advice and change from my 72 dpi to 100-500dpi i'll end up with a bad image at a huge resolution and size when in fact my initial one was perfect.

so bottom line is that if people want to make their maps on a printable size then they should work at a big resolution image and not bother with the dpi. an 800*800px map even at 300dpi will never print well on a 20"x20" paper but a 6000*6000px at 72dpi will come up just perfect.

“In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested.”- Michio Kaku

I just picked a number... when I resized Japan after to 500 dpi the image jumped up to about 11x11 inches, and I'm gonna have clean up the image a tad, the colors under the outline became quite noticeable. The text became quite clean and crisp. Ok maybe 500 is too much, but keeping images at their normal CC sizes and then blowing them up isn't a good thing, its pretty bad on the prototype I made, if you saw the board in your hands, you'd notice the pixellyness of it without any trouble.

And I did forget to mention that, any map that had army circles on it, would likely have to removed, depending on the function of the circle. Territories like Hawaii, and a few others on Extreme Global Warming would likely batter off staying.

Also you're right, some maps just aren't going to translate well to a real board. Hive, Battle of Actium, World 2.1, Conquer 4, just to name a few. But I wouldn't want to so no to anyone's wishes, as long a mapmaker gave their permission to use their image. Just know that some maps are going to be better for a real board than others. (Mostly the 'classic' style boards)

Unless I hear otherwise from the powers that be.... I would be leery doing a board with Classic on it. (assuming Sully would say its okay, of course) It probably is gonna go too close towards the copyrights for Risk.

RedBaron0 wrote:I just picked a number... when I resized Japan after to 500 dpi

Ok you shouldn't use DPI to resize images.

You should first decide the size your print needs to be. Then figure out the resolution you want to print in (ie. 72 dpi, 90 dpi, 100 dpi...) then calculate the size by multiplying the size in inches by the dpi to get the size in pixels the image needs to be.

For example, say your board is 20 inches wide, and you want to print in 100 dpi. Then all you do is multiply 20x100, so you need to make the image 2000 pixels wide.

Anyway, if your image is a bitmap image, you can't just directly scale it up. There are algorithms for scaling up bitmaps, such as sinc, but they are far from perfect, as they are based on approximation - they guess the missing pixels. If you want real print quality, then you need images that are drawn in print quality from the start. Or vector images.

I'm not worried about the ratios much, I've got square and long boards. Since I'm working with preexisting boards I can likely run into an issue of a little bit of space in one direction or another, but I was always planing on painting the edges and the back of the board.(spray paint)

Rb0, if you're still doing this project, my Eurasia map might be a good candidate for printing... It's a large map, with pretty standard gameplay, so it'd probably be easy to make a printable version out of it... let me know if you're interested.

RedBaron0 wrote:I'm not worried about the ratios much, I've got square and long boards. Since I'm working with preexisting boards I can likely run into an issue of a little bit of space in one direction or another, but I was always planing on painting the edges and the back of the board.(spray paint)

If the map is too small for the board, you could cut the edges off and glue some strips from a fabric tablecloth on and the map on top.You can also buy some cardboard and glue some fancy paper on the back and strips of fabric tablecloth in the middle so you can fold it together, then size dosent matter

When now (hopefully in a moment) Kingdom of Denmark is in beta and further on, you got my permission create a board game

LOL I hadn't checked on this in a while, thanks guys, if I do this, I will certainly let you know and give you credit. Again come the fall when the ARC tourny comes around I'll see about getting boards together for prizes.